


Old Bridges

by streetsuss_serenade



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 03:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8311573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/streetsuss_serenade/pseuds/streetsuss_serenade
Summary: Brad's not sure when Nate's Boston apartment became home to him, but he is damn sure that he's not going to be kicked out of it by Ray's refusal to plan more than five minutes in advance.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney called Scaffolding. The relevant lines are  
> "So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be /Old bridges breaking between you and me/Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall/ Confident that we have built our wall."

Boston in July might not be as hot as the Iraqi desert, but, stepping out of the overly airconditioned airport, the humid air still felt like a smack in the face. Brad had finally trained Nate out of paying $11 bucks for parking just to give him an awkward, one-armed hug by baggage claim, but that meant that Brad had to spend five minutes with the beige concrete and the litter before Nate pulled around.

Just when Brad was considering moving to try to find a shaded spot on the sidewalk, Nate’s car came into view in the line of traffic. Nate still insisted on getting out to give Brad an awkward, one-armed hug by the trunk of his car, but at least he wasn’t paying an absurd amount for the privilege.

As they headed out of the airport, Nate glanced at Brad out of the corner of his eye. “I have some news about this weekend, and you’re not going to like it.”

“What?”

Nate always assumed that Brad would resent him more than he did for the homework and study groups that always seemed to be encroaching on their time together. It wasn’t Brad’s favorite, sure, but he got that grad school wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that you could pick up and put down at will. He was ready to reassure Nate once again that he was perfectly capable of entertaining himself for the duration of a study group meeting, when Nate said something else entirely.

“I got a call from Ray earlier. I listened to the voicemail on the way here. Ray was visiting Walt in Virginia and ‘got the road trip bug.’ He said he was in Pennsylvania, and that he’d be here tonight.”

Well, that was so much more goat fucked than Brad was expecting that he couldn’t even formulate a coherent response. “He’s coming here?”

“That’s what he said. I couldn’t tell if Walt was with him or not. You can listen to the voicemail if you want.”

Brad waved that away. Ray’s ramblings weren’t going to make any more sense to him than they had to Nate.

“Anyway, I haven’t called him back yet. As I figure it, we’ve got a couple of options. I can call him back, tell him that I’m not available this weekend and hope he doesn’t show up and try to bang the door down anyway; I can tell him I’m not available and we can go to a hotel somewhere; I can tell him that my couch is taken, but he’s welcome to visit if he crashes somewhere else; I can tell him that my couch is taken, but that he’s welcome to crash on my floor. That would necessitate you actually sleeping on my couch, though.”

“I am not sleeping on your fucking couch,” Brad mutters, which makes Nate grin as he merges onto the monstrosity that Boston calls its freeway. “And I don’t want to go to a fucking hotel. I’ve been in temporary housing for weeks. I just want to go home.”

He’s not sure when Nate’s Boston apartment became as much home as the place he rented in California, but it is, and the last time Nate moved in between Brad’s visits, it had been genuinely disorienting. He thinks Nate should know how Brad feels about it, but Nate smiles a soft smile whenever Brad calls it home, so maybe not.

Whatever it is, he’s not going to be evicted from it, on the measly bit of leave he’s managed to scrape out of the Royal Marines, by some whiskey tango social reject who’s driving up the coast to bother his former platoon commander on a whim.

Besides, it’ll be nice to mock Ray to his face again. He can never tell if Ray is giving his reprimands the attention they deserve when he sends them by email.

“Fuck it. If Ray doesn’t have the social fucking graces to call before he gets on the road, then he can deal with having to find somewhere else to crash.”

Nate slants a careful look in his direction. “And if Walt’s with him?”

“Walt’s a good kid.”

Brad loves Nate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is how he doesn’t hesitate a beat before saying, “Okay. Dial Ray for me, will you?” while gesturing at the cell phone tucked into the cup holder in the center console. Nate wouldn’t have given Brad the option of revealing their relationship if he weren’t comfortable with it, and he’s not going to make Brad explain his reasoning, just trust that Brad can make his own decisions.

Brad punches in Ray’s number, hands the phone to Nate, and stares out the window at the oily surface of the Charles River as Nate waits for Ray to pick up.

“Hey, Ray. It’s Nate. I got your voicemail. First things first, if we’re close enough for you to drive hundreds of miles to drop in unannounced, then I think we’re close enough for you to call me by my name. ”

Brad can’t hear Ray’s replies, but Nate’s laughing as he tucks the phone against his ear and changes lanes. Nate has adapted to the lunacy of Boston drivers well. He says that Baltimore is worse, but Brad doesn’t see how that’s possible. 

“You say that, but I know better by now. Anyway, it’d be good to see you, but you can’t stay with me this weekend. I already have a houseguest.”

Brad stops listening after that, drifting slightly as Nate drives them home.

\----

It’s almost seven o’clock by the time Ray and Walt ring to be buzzed up to Nate’s apartment. Brad’s on the couch in the living room, and even he can hear Ray long before Nate gets the door open.

“LT! It’s good to see you, homes! Maybe you can be the voice of reason. Walt here swears that there is no good reason to purchase peanut butter and jelly in one jar, but he is obviously wrong. Where’s your mystery guest? Maybe she can weigh in.”

Brad has been trying hard all afternoon not to fixate on how this conversation is going to go. He is a Recon Marine, and an adult, and he is not going to be nervous about Ray fucking Person. He has halfway planned out a dozen ways of approaching the conversation to minimize the Ray explosion, but, god help him, it ends up worse than he expected. 

Ray’s face when he sees Brad on the couch is a masterpiece. He’s caught between surprise and genuine happiness, quickly covered by the usual Ray Person swagger and energy.

“Brad! You missed me that much, you old softie? You should have said. There’s plenty of Ray to go around, brother!” 

Ray tries to reach over the back of the couch to hug Brad’s head, but Brad dodges and stands up, safely out of reach. He’s glad his Ray avoidance reflexes remain sharp. He nods a hello to Walt, who has followed Ray into the room, carrying their duffels. Nate has gone straight to the kitchen, presumably to acquire the adult beverages necessary to deal with a hyper Ray.

“But, wait, are you the LT’s mystery houseguest? What the fuck, Brad. Since when are you too good to share the LT’s ample floor with us? We’ve slept in way closer quarters than this, or have you forgotten? Fuck! I’m even generous enough to let you have the couch.”

Brad is saved from having to answer by Nate’s re-entry, carrying beer, thank fuck.

“What the fuck, sir?” Ray asks, “When you said houseguest, I at least thought you’d have some hot piece of ass tucked away in here.”

Nate, because he is an asshole, just hands Ray his beer and smirks. 

Brad does not deserve this. He is sure of it. 

“Wait. Are you...wait” Ray looks wildly from Nate to Brad and back again. “What the fuck? What? Brad! What the FUCK?” 

Ray’s face goes cartoon character animated as he takes in this new information. “Bradley, you sly, rutting, son of a bitch, have you corrupted this fine, upstanding young officer? And you didn’t tell me immediately? I thought we were friends!”

Brad suddenly wishes very hard for ear plugs. Or a radio headset. Or literally anything to listen to that isn’t Ray’s unrestricted glee.

Nate turns to Walt, completely unphased, “So, did you guys eat on the way or should I order a pizza or something?”

\----

Brad is increasingly certain that telling Ray has been the worst decision of his life, even worse than the time he ate sushi from that gas station in Arizona. Things had been fine before. If circumstances hadn't forced his hand, he would have gone on happily not telling Ray a goddamned thing about his love life.

As it is, he is now facing Ray and Nate mocking him for everything from his choice in music to his choice in shoes. They mock him endlessly, all the while giving him identical innocent expressions, while Walt sits by and sends him pitying looks. There isn't enough beer in New England to make this situation palatable. He should have stayed in England. He should have turned around and flown back the second he heard Ray was coming. He should have known that Nate and Ray, once united, would be an unstoppable force of sarcasm and annoyance.

Honestly, the mockery is one thing, but he could deal with it if it weren’t for Nate’s sudden enthusiasm for all things Ray Person. Brad suspects that Nate was deprived of the Discovery Channel as a youth, or he hasn’t spent enough time on Wikipedia, or he has suffered some other fundamental deficit in his development, because he finds all of the inane bullshit that Ray spews fascinating. Every time Ray coughs up some random fact about jellyfish immortality or Charlemagne’s school of bastard children, Nate is all focused attention and follow up questions. 

Ray’s so enthused by the rare receptive audience that he’s already knocked over a lamp and sloshed beer on Walt, sprawled on the floor, with his wild gesticulating. Brad doesn’t mind Nate having friends, obviously, and if Nate chooses to befriend Ray, well, Brad’s living in a glass house there. But this conversation is driving him crazy, and he can’t really put a finger on why.

Luckily, Nate has forgone his “Beer tastes better out of a glass, Brad” nonsense in favor of actual bottles. That bullshit is embarrassing enough when they’re alone, nevermind in front of Marines. At least this way, when Brad goes to get another round from the fridge, it gives him an excuse to stay in the kitchen a few moments longer, rinsing out some of the empties.

He’s being ridiculous, and he knows it, but that doesn’t actually make it less annoying to fly 3,000 miles and have his time with Nate co-opted by Ray, of all people. It’s just that he’d wanted to come home. And hadn’t realized until now that home didn’t just mean this drafty apartment, but the routines that he and Nate had built there. Sometimes Nate had to go deal with school, but when Nate was there, they ate way too many shitty burritos from the walk up Mexican place two blocks over, because acquiring real food took too much time and effort. Brad made Nate watch a lot of extreme sports, because he liked how Nate wrinkled his nose at the commentators and offered to buy them all thesauruses if they’d just stop saying “thrilling” for the love of god, and Nate beat Brad at Stratego a lot. This isn’t bad, but it isn’t that, either. It isn’t familiar. It doesn’t feel like home. 

Brad needs to get his shit together, though, because after Ray asks “Where’d Brad go?” Walt says “I think he’s sulking in the kitchen.” Brad makes a mental note to kick him on his way back to the couch.

Brad pitches his voice to be heard from the kitchen “I’m cleaning up after your sorry asses so the LT doesn’t decide that he can do better and dump you for friends who understand that the primary function of a beer bottle is to deliver the carbonated malt beverage into your mouths, not to use as a tool for dripping beer all over his floor.”

 

\-------  
Later, after Ray and Walt have refused the offer of a taxi and wandered into the night, and Nate and Brad have forgone cleaning up the rest of the beer bottles in favor of bed, Nate tucks his head closer into the curve Brad’s neck and asks “So does this mean we’re telling people now?”

Brad thinks for a moment. He hadn’t meant it to be. He’d honestly just reacted to the idea of getting kicked out of his space by Ray’s impetuousness, but he can’t think of a reason to say no. This evening had been new and uncomfortable, but it hadn’t actually been that bad, and, to be honest, Brad would like to stop lying to his mother about where he’s spending his leave. 

“I guess so. If you want.”

“I only ask because my family is pretty certain that I’m seeing someone, and the backstory that my sisters have started to invent for you is getting out of hand.”

“I find myself deeply concerned about the mental stability of your family.”

“Your name is Steve. You’re an actuary. We would have already moved in together, except you have a cat, and I don’t like her.”

“Nate, what the fuck? An actuary?”

“Yeah, I don’t know either.” Nate yawns and rolls onto his side. “I don’t know whether they chose an actuary because they actually think that’s the kind of person I’d end up with or if they just wanted something as far away from Marine as possible so I wouldn’t be offended.”

“You are exactly the kind of self-righteous, overly honorable person who would get offended by that suggestion. It’s not like they could guess that you went did that exact thing.”

“Not my fault, you started it.” Nate mutters into his pillow.

Brad, thinking back to the moment when Nate had finally lost patience with all of it and kissed him, doesn’t see how Nate could possibly support that position. 

“Did I?”

“You kept being there all tall and ...” Nate huffs “right all the time. It was very distracting.”

Brad loves it when Nate gets sleepy. It doesn’t happen very often, as Nate had learned to fall asleep pretty quickly when he could just like the rest of them, but sometimes he reaches a certain point where he is mostly asleep but talking to keep himself awake, and it never fails to be hilarious. Sleepy Nate is just as stubborn and argumentative as Nate awake, but significantly less cogent. Once, over the phone, Nate had gone on a long rant about platypuses, ending by sleepily insisting “But they have spurs, Brad, spurrrrrrsssssss.” Brad is determined never to let him forget it.

“Well, sir, when you tell your parents about me, maybe don’t lead with that. We wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea.”

“Solid copy,” Nate murmurs “Sleep now. They’ll definitely get the wrong idea if you murder Ray, and we have to go on the run.”


End file.
